Last updated on 14 June 2021
As a business owner, you need to know how to drive traffic to your Shopify store. In order to reach your maximum sales potential, you need to take advantage of all the methods you have at your disposal. From having an optimized website, to setting up ads on the social media platforms and having people talking about you, everything needs to be set up perfectly.
Let’s take a look at the many methods you can use in order to drive traffic to your Shopify store and convert your visitors into customers.
1. Optimize Your Store For The Search Engines
Optimizing for the search engines is one of the most important parts of setting up an online store. Using on-page and off-page optimization techniques, you can greatly increase your website traffic, because people will find you in the search engine results.
When we’re talking about SEO, there are a few important aspects you can do yourself, and increase your traffic considerably.
For starters, it’s important that all the texts on your website contain keywords. You can either use a keyword finder and analyzer tool, or simply use the Google, Yahoo, or Bing suggestions to see what people are searching for. It’s important to choose keywords with little competition, as a new store will have a hard time competing with the big domains.
Second, you need to make sure your images are optimized. Optimizing images for Shopify is actually very easy, and as long as you follow a few rules, you can’t fail. Make sure all the images have proper names and alt tags and you’re good to go.
Ultimately, Shopify offers you the possibility of setting your own meta-title and meta-description, meaning that the people who will find you in searches will see them. The meta-title is the name of the page, while the meta-description is the summary of the page shown in the results.
Only by using these three methods, your website will already have a high SEO score, and your website will start getting indexed by the search engines.
Additionally, you will need to start creating backlinks. This means that your website should be present on other people’s websites or blogs. This will help your domain get a higher authority, and automatically, a higher position in the searches. The easiest approach to backlinks is guest posting, meaning that you can create posts for other blogs, where you can include links to your own store.
Besides having people from that blog interact with your store, you will also be seen as a more authoritative domain by the search engines. Make sure you add Google Analytics to your Shopify store and track your results!
2. Use Social Media
It’s important for any business to have a strong social media presence. Nowadays, everyone is using at least one social media platform, and it’s very important that your store is part of that world, and that you manage to drive traffic to your Shopify store.
Platforms like Pinterest and Twitter can bring you a lot of organic traffic, without having to promote your posts, while others, such as Facebook and YouTube will require you to invest in your ads in order to reach a wider audience.
These are the social media platforms that have advertising platforms:
- Pinterest;
- Reddit;
- Facebook/Instagram;
- Twitter;
- Google/YouTube;
- Snapchat;
- TikTok
You need to create engaging posts for your visitors, you need to interact with them whenever you get the chance and of course, set up social media ads in order to have more visibility.
For example, if we’re talking about Facebook and Instagram ads, you can simply set them up once and have them running on both platforms. In general, there’s a complicated process behind ads, as you need to figure out which version will work best and use that in order to bring more traffic to your Shopify store.
Each platform has a specific and you need to learn exactly how each of them works. If Facebook and Twitter users won’t have a problem with reading a description and having a link to the website, Instagram and Pinterest users will want to see catchy images and graphics in order to engage with your store. When it comes to YouTube, you need to be creative and create video ads, as that’s the platform’s specific.
Once you have all these aspects figured out, you will start seeing an improvement in your stats. Shopify also offers you the possibility to connect your store directly to the Messenger app and send custom messages to your clients and visitors. This is a very important aspect of the general user satisfaction process.
3. Affiliate Marketing
Through affiliate marketing, any store can increase its sales. The system is very easy. You create an affiliate program for your store, and people can start signing up for it. This way, they will promote your products and services on their blogs, while also receiving a small percentage of the sales.
By doing this, you can promote your products and services through people, and generate more sales directly. More and more people are looking to join affiliate marketing programs, as it’s one of the best monetizing methods for blogs.
4. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is considered to be a new method for marketers. This involves searching for a social media influencer to promote your products and services. When it comes to payment, it’s very important to set things straight upfront. Some influencers work based on a fixed-fee, others will work with a percentage of the sales.
These campaigns can bring you a lot of website traffic and increase the sales, but of course, you need to make sure that the influencer you choose really has an active follower count that his audience is interested in your products.
You will need to have a set objective when initiating such a campaign. You can sell your products, raise brand awareness, or generate leads you can later send sales pitches to.
6. Word Of Mouth
The most important method you can use to drive traffic is to have people actively talking about you. Think about it this way. You sell a product to a customer, and then offer him support and answers to his question. Because that customer will be very happy with both your product and after-sale support, he will start recommending you to his family, friends, co-workers, etc.
Since the reference comes directly from someone they know, who shares the same beliefs and actually tested the product, they will be more likely to test the product themselves. This is why it’s very important to make sure that your clients are satisfied from the moment they interact with your website, to the moment after the sale was made.
You have a lot of methods to drive traffic to Shopify, and if you get the right start, everything will be a lot easier. Keep in mind that some methods, such as optimizing for the search engines, will take a couple of months to start binging traffic, so it would be best to have it set up as soon as possible.
